Andrés del Río, Antonio del Castillo and José G. Aguilera and the development of Mexican Science in the XIXth century
Abstract
This article analyzes the intrinsic relation between education and science in the process of institutionalization of mineralogy and geology in nineteenth-century Mexico. It focuses on the intellectual leadership of three men of sciences in the modernization and professionalization of geology's curricula. These were: Andrés Manuel del Río, Antonio del Castillo y José G Aguilera. The work of these men represents the human foundation of the process of institutionalization and professionalization of Earth Sciences in Mexico: from the Royal Mining Seminar, to the Mining School and the National School of Engineering, to the National Institute of Geology, the latter the immediate antecedent of the modern Institute of Geology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Elizabeth Emma Ferry traces the movement of minerals as they circulate from Mexican mines to markets, museums, and private collections. She describes how and why these byproducts of ore mining come to be valued by people in various walks of life as scientific specimens, religious offerings, and luxury collectibles. The story of mineral exploration and trade defines a rich and variegated US-Mexican space and sheds new light on this complex relationship.
This article presents a dialogue with the past of technical education starting from the questions that arise nowadays. The authors hold that the Mexican technical education has been directed since the 19th Century by the French polytechnical model that has been fiercely criticized since then because of its excessive theoretical and school load at the expense of practice. The authors show that there is some continuity between the approaches and the curriculum designs of the Porfiriato and the post-revolutionary ones, and they show how the polytechnical model has been expanding by means of the federal technical education system during the last third of the 20th Century, and also the changes and innovations it has undergone. They finally discuss the actual dispersion of technical education, that can be observed in its administrative takeover by the states and by its normative reintegration of general education facing our times' change of knowledge and competences.
Aguilera convoca y crea la Sociedad Geológica Mexicana y, con ella
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En 1904 José G. Aguilera convoca y crea la Sociedad Geológica Mexicana y, con ella, el